


Idée Fixe

by Chanel_Pirate



Category: Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Genre: M/M, Sex Drugs and Berlioz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 09:40:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20740130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chanel_Pirate/pseuds/Chanel_Pirate
Summary: "My heart’s book inscribed on every page. […] All I have suffered, all I have attempted.”—Victor HugoThe vision must always end.





	Idée Fixe

Laudanum and physical exhaustion drown the fear, and Daniel can drift off at last. The weight beneath him shifts, rises, pushing him aside.

When he next opens his eyes, it is to the sound of the piano. His throat is dry and raw with the aftertaste of camphor when he attempts to swallow. He moves and winces, his lower back sore from sleeping on the chaise longue. Alexander is dressed, and Daniel can tell from the way he is slumped over the piano that he has not noticed that he is awake.

The sky beyond the parlour windows bleeds violet stains. This time of year in Prussia is volatile, he’d heard, capricious, the days shortening by hours overnight. Time trampled underfoot.

His vision contracts, threatening to capsize, and he groans as he attempts to rise to a seated position. He scrabbles for a vial of laudanum. One must have rolled beneath a cushion.

Alexander’s laugh is no louder than a breath. “Well, Daniel?” He keeps playing, aimless, and corrects his posture. “Got some rest, did you?”

It takes some time for Alexander’s voice to travel to him. There is a glass vial in his grasp, somehow. He grins. “Noticed, have you?”

“No nightmares,” Alexander says, matter-of-fact, and descends an arpeggio with unnecessary flourish.

Daniel shakes his head, against whatever-is-happening spreading across his face, again against his hair in his eyes, and again, just because of the thickness of the air against the lightness between his ears. The vial is unstoppered, now. “It’s getting colder,” he hears his own voice say.

“Summer here feels eternal,” Alexander is saying. Warm days followed by dry valley thunderstorms, week on week, he might be saying. “Until one wakes up one morning to find the trees bare, and the frost digging in,” he definitely says, and the tune begins to take shape. “It’s bastard weather.”

“Yes. Bastard,” Daniel wavers into, then out of, clarity, and downs the laudanum before he can stumble into it again. He shuts his eyes, and the constant roaring ebbs. He listens to his breath. “Orange, yellow leaves. Crumbling. Marvellous.” Breaking beneath boots like spines, he’s not sure if he adds aloud.

He tries dropping his head, in part due to the weight becoming unduly taxing, and in part to not have to look at Alexander’s frown. He finds nothing there, and falls on his back. Alexander continues playing. He listens.

Rising, falling. Repeating. “What’s that,” he slurs, turning his head. He can’t see Alexander’s face from here.

“Funny you should ask,” Alexander says after what could have been hours, as though himself just realising. “Yule, a few years ago. I had occasion to be in Paris. A young composer announced his intention to change all that had preceded him. I heard it at the Conservatoire. He called it the Symphonie Fantastique. So earnest. He had written a whole programme describing the poetic and musical integrity of the piece in words, as though the music were not enough.”

Daniel tries to sit. “And, what.”

“This melody,” Alexander continues, and comes to a rising and falling tune Daniel recognises from earlier. “This one. It persists throughout the entire symphony, in many variations. He called it the idée fixe.”

“Why,” Daniel says, resting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “It’s so. It’s painful.”

“His passion,” comes Alexander’s voice, “his yearning for the remote and unattainable, and it runs through everything.”

In that moment, Daniel wants to see Alexander’s face. He attempts to shuffle to the other side of the chaise longue, and listens. “He must have loved someone very much.”

“Yes,” Alexander says, and falls silent for a few minutes. The piece sounds lonely, in Alexander’s hands, not plucked so much as wrenched from his piano. “I’d entered into correspondence with him, that Berlioz boy. He’d written it lovelorn, looking to impress an Irish actress. He’d fallen in love watching her Ophelia, or something equally dreadful.”

Daniel sees the face he pulls in profile, and finds it in himself to laugh.

“But he did provide me with some notation.” Alexander glances at Daniel, now nearer. “And at least I was able to suffer through his romantic nonsense for that. I’ve managed to arrange it for piano, but it pales before the majesty of a full orchestra. You should have heard the timpani at the end of the third movement—”

Daniel listens to him, listens to the piano, focus flowing, ebbing, and marvels that this is the same man, this man with his passions, his music, that earlier showed him how to skin a man alive, collect his blood, boil it into life. His fingers seek purchase, he doesn’t know on what, for what, but somewhere in the stillness of his mind he registers, a craving, for more. More laudanum.

He clenches his shaking fist.

“Tell me,” he says, interrupting Alexander. His brow is wet when he touches it, his cheeks. “Tell me what happens.”

There is no humour in Alexander’s smile. He stops playing. His eyes run over Daniel as he shifts on the piano stool. “His solitude bests him. He loses hope. He attempts to end his life with opium, but instead of killing him, the dose only produces hallucinations. Phantasms.” Alexander’s voice washes over Daniel, and he cannot stop his shivering. There is an edge to it, that he feels against his throat. “He dreams that he murders his beloved, and is there to witness his own execution, in a musical march to the scaffold. His last words,” he plays part of the melody, on its own, “represented by the first phrase of the idée fixe. His dying obsession. Incomplete.”

“Then what?” Daniel dares to breathe.

“Then, of course.” Alexander’s tone lightens, and he plays it again, jaunty, in a grotesque parody of itself, “He is gathered in a midnight sabbath of spectres, beasts, screaming at—presiding over his own funeral. His beloved appears, degraded, to join in the satanic merriment, no more than a demonic jezebel. There’s a Dies irae, some solemn death knells, everything he has ever worked for comes to nothing, and life goes merrily on, and on, and on.”

There is something manic in his smile.

Daniel blinks. “In the symphony?”

“Yes, in the symphony.”

Daniel manages to stand, and moves to the sideboard. On it is a vase of dried roses. He’d been appraising them out of the corner of his eye.

“And in real life?”

Alexander pushes away from the piano. His gaze fixes on Daniel. He stands. “She was impressed by the symphony he wrote with his ideal of her in mind. They married. And as often happens with men who pursue women, especially in such a manner, they separated after a couple of years of misery.”

“As ever,” Daniel mutters. Alexander is almost at his elbow. “These are long dead.” He reaches out to touch a rose. It immediately crumbles into dust. He notices it is a Damascus rose. “Why do you keep them? Is it for—”

“When they first bloom, yes,” Alexander says, and Daniel is grateful that he has interrupted him, that he had not let him bring what happens in the dungeons here, into this moment. “Desiccated, however, I would describe the effects more as an anodyne.”

Daniel turns to him. His form sharpens and blurs, his mind attempting to fix him in place. He wants to sit.

Alexander places a hand on his shoulder. “Something to dull the ache only long years can bring.”

Daniel tries to find his breath beneath the ache of something between his ribs. He raises his hand, meaning to bring it atop Alexander’s, but he is already halfway to the door.

“Come. We have much work ahead of us in the morning.”

Daniel lingers a moment in the darkening room, trapped between the abandoned piano and some dead flowers. The air cloys, scratching at his throat. Soon, it will turn and shrivel.

He moves to find Alexander.


End file.
